Burton K Wheeler
The G.O.A.T. That Can't Be Got
- Location
- Tr'ondëk
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So for early history:
Should Tolowa Bay be a Russian outpost?
1824: McLoughlin isn't in charge at Oregon city, the HBC isn't as conciliatory to American settlers
1827: Jedidiah Smith, coming north from California, discovers Tolowa Bay. He doesn't get into trouble with the Umpqua and surveys a route from Tolowa Bay back to the Columbia. The best way I can see on a map from the Klamath basin is to get into the Deschutes drainage, so it's not a straight shot like the future railroad will be.
Maybe the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, which is struggling by the early 1830's, makes a last shot at relevance by attempting to get into the Pacific trade, maybe in partnership with a shipper from back east. We can say it's a Philadelphia company to explain the "Franklin" name. Instead of going on the Santa Fe trail, maybe Smith guides them back to Tolowa Bay.
That actually gives me an idea about the political characteristics of Jefferson as opposed to Washington, Oregon, and California. You could say that the first pioneers out there were Pennsylvania Quakers and that shaped the attitudes people had. I guess with the name "Jefferson" early on you'd have to say that the early pioneers were Democrats, right?
That way you have four major West Coast naval bases instead of just three as per OTL.
I'm aware of what a naval shipyard is and does. The U.S. Navy of 1900-1920 would absolutely have made a fourth west coast naval base if an appropriate choice was available. Again, this is no expansion beyond what was actually done OTL, it's just that Hunter's Point is at Port Franklin instead of San Francisco. This shipyard almost certainly would not survive the 1980's, just like Hunter's Point. My model is Hunter's Point. Hunter's Point started as a private shipyard that contracted with the Navy before being taken over by the Navy in 1940.
One could just have Dakota admitted as a single state and it’s still a fifty-state union.Excellent.
On a completely unrelated matter, how are you going to address the dynamic of the Union having another state? A 51-state nation is going to behave a bit differently than a 50 state nation. Or are you planning to eliminate a state to keep that number?
One could just have Dakota admitted as a single state and it’s still a fifty-state union.
I don’t remember enough details of why those particular states were drawn that way to give a good answer. It was probably, as with most western states, part geography, part special interests, part population and part nice neat lines.I’ll confess that my initial thought, based on how much of Oregon was carved out to create the new state, was to reward it with a chunk of the thicker part of Idaho, give Washington the thinner part, and the remainder of the state be given to Wyoming (complete with adjustments to its Utah and Montana borders for asthetics’s sake). Something like this:
View attachment 8458
(And sorry for image quality, quick little thing done on iPhone)
But I’m almost certain that there’s probably a reason somewhere why the congresses of the mid-19th Century would be dead-set against this. Eh, one can dream...
Another thing I thought about is to bring the Jefferson border down to the 40th parallel, but that, as you said, takes a bite out of the California goldfields.
I don't know that that's actually a problem.
So apparently the first people into the goldfields left their farms in Oregon, or I could be misremembering something I read years ago. The first ships didn't come in for almost a year. Either way, the Port Franklin people have as much if not more claim on the gold than California. They've been there a few years longer than most of the California people, too.
The question is still who exactly it is who settled there in the late 1840's and how exactly Congress declares it its own territory, but I don't think that's critical.